SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
This week, a first-of-its-kind study from Stanford put numbers to AI and the job market. The paper says not only is AI taking jobs, it is making it harder for young people to find work, and pointed to traditional tech roles like software developers as being most affected.
Sinead Bovell is somebody who has been thinking a lot about the future of work and how young people should navigate all of this. She's the founder of a tech education company called WAYE. When I spoke to her, I asked what we got wrong when it comes to thinking about AI and the workforce.
SINEAD BOVELL: I mean, I think the kind of big misconception or the false assumption that a lot of people had been making was robots and very routine, predictable workflows were the ones that would be first in line for any form of augmentation or automation by artificial intelligence.
And now, as a result of advances in generative AI and in large language models, it isn't just routine tasks. It's also somewhat creative or unpredictable or just different types of tasks also seem to be in the line of fire. Even creative works. All of these different areas that we thought were - would take longer for AI to be able to complete, AI is seeming to be able to do these things, at least at a sufficient level, a level that maybe a junior hire would be able to.
DETROW: Can you give me one specific example of a type of job like that, a junior-type job that's suddenly endangered?
BOVELL: I mean, I don't think it's a particular job. I'd say it's the tasks within jobs and then how many of those tasks would make up the full job. And then if you're leaning towards 60, 70, 80%, then the question becomes, does it make sense to hire somebody for that role at all? So if a task has basic writing, data entry, analysis, marketing copy, the first draft of a legal brief, these are all tasks that AI can handle at a level that is in some ways indistinguishable from what a junior hire would.
Of course, there's going to be some mistakes and some hallucinations. But if you're able to look out for that and there's somebody overseeing that, companies could argue does it make as much sense right now to have a human in that role or somebody writing social media captions or doing basic round of a first draft of code for the kind of least-viable or MVP version of a basic app? These are all things that AI is getting better at.
DETROW: Given that, how should people be thinking about their education, what they need to be learning when it comes to technology and AI so they can be competitive in the workforce?
BOVELL: Yeah. So this one is definitely tricky. So I'd say there are some nonnegotiable skills for a future with artificial intelligence. These are skills like judgment, communication, deep thinking, adaptability. And I'm going to give you a specific example with judgment, right? So we don't know how fast these systems are going to continue to evolve. But if a supercomputer can give you 15 great answers, which one is the best for your context?
The judgment skills there are profoundly challenging. And did you ask the AI the right question in the first place, and did you communicate it properly? These are all really challenging skills that we're going to need to nurture. We think of judgment in one way, but in a world with supercomputers, it's going to raise the bar on the skills that we need to bring to the table. And even kind of deep thinking through how do you structure a problem that you're going to pass to a supercomputer? These are all skills. We nurture them a little bit in school, but they certainly aren't the focus. So building these skills, I think, is quite vital.
Also understanding, how do you learn, knowing that AI is going to continue to evolve? There's no one-time upgrade and then you're prepared for a world with artificial intelligence. These tools are going to continue to change, and so the skills we bring to the table and the bucket of skills, the bucket of knowledge, we bring is also going to have to. So how well do you learn? In which context do you learn best? Do we know these things? So these are certain skills I think are vital.
And then also just the ability to adapt, and we hear that over and over again. But the fabric of the workforce is changing. The average shelf life of a skill is maybe 2.5 years now in a world with artificial intelligence. Not so much those skills like judgment and critical thinking, but a hard skill, a more technical skill. So being prepared to kind of go back to the drawing board, learn new things, pivot and step into different industries, that is all the new fabric of the workforce.
DETROW: You're talking about specific skills. More generally, how are you advising people about the decisions they need to make to set themselves up for the future, given how much the future is changing? I mean, I'm talking about anything from career majors to looking at different industries that you want to prepare yourself to hopefully enter - and hopefully, there is a job and career there, you know, like there has been in the past.
BOVELL: Yeah. So I think the first is the mindset shift. So knowing that idea that we learn, we work and then we retire, that's going away. So just to have the expectation that you're going to be moving through many different industries and many different types of jobs, to start to see yourself as an entrepreneur that comes to the table with a bouquet of skills and the ability to adapt and to learn, that is vital, understanding that that is kind of the mindset for the future.
And that if you can think deeply, if you can learn quickly, if you can communicate well, you have strong judgment and you can adapt, that is a pretty fierce toolkit for the future of work because it doesn't really matter which way the technology goes or how industries build or decline as a result of artificial intelligence. You can pivot and adapt and evolve in the future of work. So I think to start there.
But there are some more certain fields in terms of growth in the future. You hear a lot about biology as the next frontier for tech leaders for the world of artificial intelligence. There's a lot of convergence there. So if a student is interested in the field of biology, it's hard to know exactly what that job would be, but that is an industry that we're going to see growth in. If you're thinking about something on the frontiers of space or robotics.
So these are kind of higher sectors that we can see there will be growth in. But again, drilling down to the jobs, it's much easier to predict the jobs that could be automated than the ones that are going to be invented. So I think, again, thinking through the bundle of skills and then the ability to adapt and learn is in some ways your best bet.
DETROW: How often are you actively thinking about how different your job will be in five or 10 years?
BOVELL: All the time.
DETROW: Yeah.
BOVELL: All the time. And I think - I mean, at the end of the day, too, this technology, it's going to ebb and flow. But what differentiates it from a lot of technologies is that it is a general-purpose technology. So even though there's going to be hype and there's going to be bubbles that burst - and that is inevitable - general-purpose technologies become infrastructure, and we rebuild our societies on top of them. That much is a guarantee.
So the world is going to look very different. And whether that's in three years, eight years or 15 years, it's coming. So there's some solace in that, in that we understand how this technology is going to behave. The timelines are a bit fuzzier, but we know that that's the path that it is on.
DETROW: That is Sinead Bovell, the founder of the tech education company WAYE. Thank you so much.
BOVELL: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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